Current services that provide arrival alerts often rely on receiving continuous location updates from a moving target (e.g., a vehicle) in order to determine, as accurately as possible, a timing of alerting the destination (e.g., a store) of the moving target's arrival at the destination. For example, when a user is driving to a location of a store to pick up an ordered item, the system's objective is to provide an accurate advance alert (arrival alert) to the operator of the store so that the operator can ensure the user's order is ready for pick when the user arrives.
The requirement for such continuous transmission of location updates from a tracking device (e.g., a mobile device) associated with the moving target to the server, results in large signaling overheads, network resource consumption and consumption of computation capacity at the server. In addition, these continuous transmissions also increase the battery and data usage of the tracking device. For example, given that mobile devices use data and relatively large amount of battery charge to communicate with nearby cell towers or access points, a mobile device that is configured to send location updates to the server via the cell tower or over a WiFi connection, every second or so, can rapidly deplete its battery and increase its data usage.